As usual when someone pulls out PE, you don't understand it. PE is an answer to phyletic gradualism: the idea that evolution proceeds at a roughly constant rate. Insofar as it is limited to that, it's dead on.
Unfortunately, the idea that we never see any sort of gradualism, or that there is no evidence that the ultimate process of evolution is gradualistic, is nonsense, and that's not what the widely accepted understanding of PE proves or attempts to prove. There are countless examples of fossilized "series" beds like diatoms where we can litterally watch generation to generation as a speciation event occurs. The process happens gradually.
What PE suggests is that species often remain for a long time similar and then undergo relatively rapid change (by relative, we mean tens of thousands of years). But the change is ultimately still gradual in its specific generation to generation nature.
While the way in which creationists use the term "macroevolution" is indeed incorrect and misleading, that doesn't mean that the term isn't used in biology. It is. Scientists debate the roles that various macroevolutionary forces played in the history of life on earth all the time.
You should probably be familiar with some of the more famous obviously beneficial mutations.
For instance, some women (the trait is sex-linked) have tetrachromatic vision: they have four different color receptors instead of three, and can thus distinguish colors much better than normal humans, in addition to being able to see into the ranges normal humans can't (like ultraviolet).
In Italy, a single mutation has spread to a whole town which confers an immunity to the bad effects of cholesterol: making them near immune to the sort of heart disease the rest of us face.
In Connecticut, there is a family carrying a mutation that gives them super-dense, apparently unbreakable bones.
In Germany, a boy was born with a unique condition in which his body produces little or no fat and has given him tons of muscle (to be fair, this might cause health problems down the line, but it is still impressive).
In Africa, one family has started having children born without the middle three toes on each foot. This apparently allows them to run faster and climb trees more easily than other people.
In Europe, some people had an immunity to the Black Plauge which made their macrophages resistant to viruses that targeted them. As a result of the plauge, this trait became much more common (13% of Swedes carry it). It appears that the trait may even make people immune to AIDS.
And so on. All these are examples of relatively RECENT mutations that have cropped up in just the HUMAN population.
But there is no scientific definition of "kinds" in the sense you mean it. As was noted, there is no real life analog to what "genus" or "family" or "order" actually describe. These categories were created to helpfully organize living things so that we could easily distinguish certain general sets of traits from others. But in neither genetics nor morphology is there any consistent definition or dividing line between one level or the next, no different than there is no specific point at which a dribble of sand creates a sand dune.
In science, direct observation is not necessarily any more important than any other form of evidence. Forensic evidence can often be MORE reliable than eyewitness accounts, because forensic evidence can converge on a conclusion from multiple different vantage points in a way that direct observation cannot. The amount of evidence demonstrating common descent is almost beside the point: it's the way all these lines of evidence all converge in so many different cross-confirming ways and in such detail that makes common descent such a certain conclusion: as certain as near anything can be.
Even that could use some correction. We are descended from a common ancestor we share with other modern apes. We ourselves are apes, monkeys, primates, mammals, amniotes, tetrapods, vertebrates, chordates, deuterostomes, animals, eukaryotes, biota, etc. We still belong to every ancestral group our ancestors belonged to, because we retain all the criteria that defines those groups.
What you don't mention is that it was science that uncovered and corrected these frauds.
In many cases, of course, it's not even clear why scientists should be blamed. Take Woo-Suk. He claimed to have done something that everyone already had good reason to believe was possible. Thus there was no easy way to uncover his deception until others had the chance to try and reproduce his methods and results. All he done was present his paper, which described his methods. It was peer-reviewed on that basis, and the science was found to be sound and reasonable. This part of the process cannot weed out deliberate deception easily. But that doesn't mean that later stages of testing cannot. Woo-Suk had to admit what he'd done in part because it was inevtiable that when other scientist read his article and tried to reproduce his results, they would find out that he was BS'ing.
Not quite: one different base pair and a number of other functional differences. Of course, RNA is found in all cells with DNA, and RNA is thought to be a precursor to DNA.
Oh, but it's even funnier than that. We've cultured bacteria colonies from a SINGLE cell and then shown how some have evolved immunity to certain conditions and some haven't. In such a case, the idea that the resistance traits had "always been there" is functionally nonsense. We only started with a single genome. Everything else diverged and evolved from there. Where did the genes for resistence come from in that situation if not from mutation increasing the variation?
Tell me: how do you show that bacteria are a different species? Do you wait and see if one population of bacteria can mate with another population? In most cases, you'd be waiting a long, long time, since they don't reproduce sexually in the first place (though the real story is immensely more complicated than that)
Species is an inherently vague concept regardless, but species in bacteria is ultimately nothing more than the sum total of genetic difference from some ancestor. When you reproduce asexually, that's pretty much all you have to go on. We've sat and watched bacteria evolve entirely new metabolic pathways. In real time. So many times that you can barely get an article about it published in a journal of evolution because it's so mundane a result. Any one of these results could easily get classed as a new species. We've gotten bacteria that's genetically quite different from where we began. That's all that's necessary in bacteria to show that it can speciate over time. There is usually no other criteria to go by!
Even Behe had to admit that even under his simulations, bacteria could evolve seemingly IC structures within not only a reasonable amount of time, but under unrealistically unfavorable conditions.
How about bdelloid rotifers. When we first encountered them, we described a number of species based on morphological differences. Then we noticed something bizarre: no males. No sex. Just lots of apparent virgin births. Suddenly, it became apparent that these rotifers had at some point traced back to a single ancestor who for some reason started popping out babies without any daddy. And genetic studies have shown this conclusion to be unmistakable: because the paired chromosomes never recombine, they, unlike most chromosomes, have steadily drifted apart from each other via random mutation in non-coding regions, allowing us to not only track back the apparent "species" but even date the divergences.
And that's just playing around in the asexual areas you started us off in.
"There are over a hundred species of bacteria which we have been studying bacteria for well over a hundred years."
The grammar here is hard to make out. But hopefuly you aren't saying that there are only 100 species of bacteria. Heck, there are more than 100 indentified species of Lactobacillus alone. I wonder where all these bacteria that all share so many basic morphological traits well within the rates of genetic mutation to explain could have come from?
Before ranting on about naturalistic justifications, hows about showing ANY exmaple of what you mean by a justification of these concepts... of ANY sort. In my experience, all such justifications have the same problems getting off the ground, whether they are natural or not. In fact, the supernatural justifications are generally even more ridiculous.
As a more observant poster has already noted, most people think that things like morals are accepted and recongized based on shared values rather than any sort of "objective" justification. It's not even clear that the concept of "justification" makes any sense to first principles of morality. Either you accept the premises or you don't. If they are determined by anything, then they aren't absolute and so are arbitrary.
Natural selection demonstrates quite well how information is added to DNA. Variation provides the noise. Selection provides the seive. The result is information about environmental conditions encoded into the remaining DNA. Of course, unlike in your argument, I'm defining information in a very specific way. In reality, defining information in biology is really pretty difficult, because so much of it is contextual and happenstance.
Can NS explain how all information in biological life came from? We don't know. But no one has yet put forward an alternative process with any evidence to speak for its operation or detectable character.
The origin of the system of DNA itself is not necessarily via NS, but is no less implausible in terms of chemistry and entropy. The question of how the most basic of information got to be cannot be answered by evolution itself, but it doesn't seem to be implausible via some as yet unknown particular chemical process that we've yet to pick out amongst the trillions and trillions possible all over the place.
So, by and large, I don't find your hinting at the mysterious special origin of information very convincing.
You are a theistic evolutionist, like prominent biologist and ID critic Kenneth Miller. I think you might like his book: "Finding Darwin's God" It's a great read that picks on both ID theorists for misusing science... and militant atheists for doing the same.
We should note that while dogs show a tremendous variation of traits, they can still interbreed in part because the concept of "purebreeds" have so often collapsed in practice. Just like purebred wizards, most purebred lines have very recent common ancestors with other dogs and even wolves. Sometimes this happened by accident, other times because breeders just didn't have any other option to hopefully preserve a particular trait.
You're right about the wild though. Dogs have evolved to suit life with humans, and various traits have evolved not because they serve any great survival purpose in red tooth and claw, but because they serve a survival purpose in appealing to human beings.
In that case, they'd likely be wrong. In evolution, descedants never leave the groupings of their parents, and they certainly don't do so to jump over into a completely different grouping way farther up the rung.
Human beings are still chordates. Still tetrapods. Still amniotes. Still mammals. Still primates. Still apes. There is no way to define any of those categories that does not include humans... or gibbons. And the same is true for all life (even when modern life seems to lack a particular trait, like legs on a dolphin or a shell in an octopus, the history is plain and the missing feature is often just supressed or reduced but still discernable as being part of the development). In that sense, despite being very powerful, evolution is actually very morphologically and trait conservative. We stick pretty close to what made our ancestors distinct from other life at the time without every going back and jumping into another higher taxon.
There is no agreement on species because there is no good way to define species that will not be inconsistent or incomplete in some way.
When species diverge, for instance, there is often a range of hybridism still possible between the two (from all offsping are viable and can reproduce, to only some can reproduce, to only some are viable, to all are sterile, to none are viable) rather than a distinct cutoff. Where do we draw the line when there is no line?
How do we determine species for asexual animals like bdelloid rotifers, where there IS no reproduction, just degrees of difference in the genes?
And worse, when two species diverge from one, what do we do with the species name? If breeds of dog one day become genetically incompatible, the species name familiaris will still be useful: it will still describe both species as in a distinct group from other Carnivores or even other Canis. Do we make familiaris a super-species group and rename the ? Do we create s grouping below "species" that means what "species" used to (i.e. reproductively isolated population) and change the definition of species?
As you can see, there are no really good answers. Trying to come up with a perfect definition of species is, if evolution is true, a fools' errand. At best, it's a simplification used for ease of refference.
One major problem is the popular understanding of species as being some sort of really, really important categorization that implies some deep discontinuity in nature. The problem is, species is largely a concept we use to simplify and classify stuff to make it easier to learn. But the reality is far more complex and fluid.
Not two days ago, I visited a wolphin at an aquarium: a hybrid between a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale that has an almost perfect mix of traits between two species. These are obviously distinct species (very different in size, different numbers of teeth, totally different head and face shape), and yet they could interbreed: and wolphins can even produce their own viable offspring!
If evolution is true, then hybrism must exist. And it does (it was one of Darwin's major points of proof). But like many other facts of the natural world, hybridism ultimately undermines the whole concept of reliably defining species as distinct categories, just as interacial couples and kids make a mockery of the idea of distinct races. In fact, evolution makes all rigid classification inherently problematic in any number of ways.
But simply, there can be no real evidential doubt of common descent at this point. It's just too well confirmed by too many indepedent lines of evidence that converge.
And if you concede that dog breeds can evolve from common ancestors, then you've pretty much given the whole game away. Dog breeds are very morphologically different from each other: the underlying genes are different, and ultimately those genes could only have come from the selection of mutation, because they were not present in the ancestral asiatic wolves from which all domestic dogs are descended. If you can concede that this process can evolve something as different as a Great Dane to a Pug, then you are conceeding that evolution can produce radically diverse forms of life over even short amounts of time.
Now, you might say: but dogs are still all one species. Sure, but in the end, that's immaterial. Species is generally defined as whether or not populations interbreed. But this trait is ultimately no different than the differences in genes that can produce long snouts vs. flattened faces: reproductive incompatibility is determined by changes in genes just like everything else. There is no mystery to this process. We've tracked now distinct species as they diverge from each other and become less and less genetically compatible until finally they cannot interbreed. We understand the genetic mechanisms for why this happens. So none of it is implausible or undocumented.
Put short, there just isn't any good reason to think that evolution as we know it cannot create species and diversity in life. Even Behe, the leading ID theorist, thinks we evolved from a common ancestor with other apes.
Just so you know, there are plenty of examples of chromosome duplications in even just human beings where the carriers are able to reproduce. Downs syndrome is one example: women carriers can reproduce and pass on the disorder 50% of the time. There are rarer examples where the syndrome does not have the same mental and health effects.
You have to know a lot about genetics to understand the really complex ways that chromosomes pair and get read and how they then get split up for reproduction even when they are abnormal, but the reality is that even losing or gaining whole chromosomes does not necessarily equal sterility. Mice seem to constantly be adding or losing or fusing chromosomes in their evolution, for instance. Plants are even more flexible (heck, some plants are heptadiploid: six copies of every chromosome! You KNOW they're weirdos!)
"ID supporters don't disagree that evolution occurs on a small scale."
That's not entirely true.
"They only disagree with evolution on a large scale, meaning they don't think evolution explains the creation of life."
That's not true at all. ID supporters are in general critically of the ability of any natural system to increase what they call complexity, which seems to variously include SOME complex systems, but not others. That's attacking a lot more than the plausibility of abiogenesis (i.e., the creation of life)
"This theory states that a certain 'perfect' set of species were created, and all currently existing species as decendents of these orginals, but they have diversified over the eons making them less perfect but very different."
Ah yes! One of the few examples in which ID proponents have offered a testible claim or theory. And it is wildly, insanely in contradiction with all evidence of how evolutionary history has proceeded, how genetics works, and so on.
While I agree that ID is not necessarily creationist, it's pretty hard to deny that quite a lot of the people and arguments being advanced under the rubric of intelligent design are just retreads of creationist arguments with the word "God" stripped out. ID theorists who don't share these views have ever opportunity to condemn those who do this, but instead people like Dembski end up playing coy about it. It's hard to feel too sorry for them when they get accused of being creationists, especially when they reveal their own religious agendas to certain audiences but not others.
"You are obfuscating the arguments of ID because it is much easier to simply equate them with Creationism (especially young-Earth creationism) than to come up with fossil evidence or genetic proof of the evolution of the flagella; or the eye; or any of the other examples that ID purports to show design."
To turn this around: it's pretty calculating that ID proponents would go to the public with only those examples for which there is not, and there is likely to never be, solid historical evidence that allows us to track particular pathways. This certainly gives the layperson lots of room to infer things like "natural selection can never produce new information or species or build any sort of structure." This allows ID proponents to mostly accomodate any sort of creationism one wants to believe and avoid proposing any sort of testible conclusions to boot (which was always the downfall of YEC: it advanced testible conclusions that could easily be shown to be false)
Our color vision is hardly the best in the animal kingdom. Like all mammals (who spent most of their formative years in nocturnal lifestyles in which color vision was next to useless), our color vision is quite limited. We certainly are far better than most mammals, but that's still not saying much. Birds in particular are far better. Not only do they have far higher acuity (they can make out things at much greater distances, but they also have much denser concentrations of color receptors, as well as more TYPES of color receptors (some have up to five types of cones, making them the only pentachromats in the animal kingdom, and most have two distinct classes of cones (regular and double) that operate differently at different brightnesses), allowing them to pick out far more shades than we can AND see more clearly AND deal more efficiently with light conditions. Their retinas, unlike ours, do not contain blood vessels, which scatter light and shadow certain angles. So much for that theory of needing blood vessels for acuity/color vision balance! Oh, and let's not forget light sensitivity. While humans can pick out maybe 6000 stars in the night sky, most owls can make out millions: a much grander view of the heavens!
Birds, the only living relatives of the dinosaurs: best frickin vision. Sorry, humans.
That's not what they said: they said form the start that product activation required creating a steam account, which obviously means going online at lesat just once. In fact, the only thing they CHANGED is when they annoucned that you would only need to do this once. Previously, they had implied that you would need to check in every single time you played the game (the reason being that I think their next step s to blend traditional SP gaming with a MP-type experience).
Given that many online only games are even MORE stringent about phoning home, in addition to costing more, I just can't see the big deal here. Their way has a lot of advantages, not least of which is portability and security (i.e., no one can steal my CD key and play my games and block or ban me out of the system)
I don't think so: the industry is not exactly a wheeling-eeling freemarket: it is instead dominated by big chains and brands that have an incentive to only deal properly with other big companies and publishers or else face the wrath. Add that to the fact that Valve has no way to create, box, ship, and promote the game, and they pretty much had to rely on somebody through the standard venue/contract system.
Sorry, but CS:S and DOD:S are (will be) way more fun than HL1:DM ever was or could be. Granted, a HL2DM could be cool also, and it's not shipping with the game. Too bad. But it's also inevitable, and we're already getting hints that Valve might be releasing a teaser of it soon. And to be fair, the SP is being called one of the best PC FPS games yet concieved.
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As usual when someone pulls out PE, you don't understand it. PE is an answer to phyletic gradualism: the idea that evolution proceeds at a roughly constant rate. Insofar as it is limited to that, it's dead on.
Unfortunately, the idea that we never see any sort of gradualism, or that there is no evidence that the ultimate process of evolution is gradualistic, is nonsense, and that's not what the widely accepted understanding of PE proves or attempts to prove. There are countless examples of fossilized "series" beds like diatoms where we can litterally watch generation to generation as a speciation event occurs. The process happens gradually.
What PE suggests is that species often remain for a long time similar and then undergo relatively rapid change (by relative, we mean tens of thousands of years). But the change is ultimately still gradual in its specific generation to generation nature.
While the way in which creationists use the term "macroevolution" is indeed incorrect and misleading, that doesn't mean that the term isn't used in biology. It is. Scientists debate the roles that various macroevolutionary forces played in the history of life on earth all the time.
You should probably be familiar with some of the more famous obviously beneficial mutations.
For instance, some women (the trait is sex-linked) have tetrachromatic vision: they have four different color receptors instead of three, and can thus distinguish colors much better than normal humans, in addition to being able to see into the ranges normal humans can't (like ultraviolet).
In Italy, a single mutation has spread to a whole town which confers an immunity to the bad effects of cholesterol: making them near immune to the sort of heart disease the rest of us face.
In Connecticut, there is a family carrying a mutation that gives them super-dense, apparently unbreakable bones.
In Germany, a boy was born with a unique condition in which his body produces little or no fat and has given him tons of muscle (to be fair, this might cause health problems down the line, but it is still impressive).
In Africa, one family has started having children born without the middle three toes on each foot. This apparently allows them to run faster and climb trees more easily than other people.
In Europe, some people had an immunity to the Black Plauge which made their macrophages resistant to viruses that targeted them. As a result of the plauge, this trait became much more common (13% of Swedes carry it). It appears that the trait may even make people immune to AIDS.
And so on. All these are examples of relatively RECENT mutations that have cropped up in just the HUMAN population.
But there is no scientific definition of "kinds" in the sense you mean it. As was noted, there is no real life analog to what "genus" or "family" or "order" actually describe. These categories were created to helpfully organize living things so that we could easily distinguish certain general sets of traits from others. But in neither genetics nor morphology is there any consistent definition or dividing line between one level or the next, no different than there is no specific point at which a dribble of sand creates a sand dune.
In science, direct observation is not necessarily any more important than any other form of evidence. Forensic evidence can often be MORE reliable than eyewitness accounts, because forensic evidence can converge on a conclusion from multiple different vantage points in a way that direct observation cannot. The amount of evidence demonstrating common descent is almost beside the point: it's the way all these lines of evidence all converge in so many different cross-confirming ways and in such detail that makes common descent such a certain conclusion: as certain as near anything can be.
Even that could use some correction. We are descended from a common ancestor we share with other modern apes. We ourselves are apes, monkeys, primates, mammals, amniotes, tetrapods, vertebrates, chordates, deuterostomes, animals, eukaryotes, biota, etc. We still belong to every ancestral group our ancestors belonged to, because we retain all the criteria that defines those groups.
What you don't mention is that it was science that uncovered and corrected these frauds.
In many cases, of course, it's not even clear why scientists should be blamed. Take Woo-Suk. He claimed to have done something that everyone already had good reason to believe was possible. Thus there was no easy way to uncover his deception until others had the chance to try and reproduce his methods and results. All he done was present his paper, which described his methods. It was peer-reviewed on that basis, and the science was found to be sound and reasonable. This part of the process cannot weed out deliberate deception easily. But that doesn't mean that later stages of testing cannot. Woo-Suk had to admit what he'd done in part because it was inevtiable that when other scientist read his article and tried to reproduce his results, they would find out that he was BS'ing.
Not quite: one different base pair and a number of other functional differences. Of course, RNA is found in all cells with DNA, and RNA is thought to be a precursor to DNA.
Oh, but it's even funnier than that. We've cultured bacteria colonies from a SINGLE cell and then shown how some have evolved immunity to certain conditions and some haven't. In such a case, the idea that the resistance traits had "always been there" is functionally nonsense. We only started with a single genome. Everything else diverged and evolved from there. Where did the genes for resistence come from in that situation if not from mutation increasing the variation?
Is this some sort of joke?
Tell me: how do you show that bacteria are a different species? Do you wait and see if one population of bacteria can mate with another population? In most cases, you'd be waiting a long, long time, since they don't reproduce sexually in the first place (though the real story is immensely more complicated than that)
Species is an inherently vague concept regardless, but species in bacteria is ultimately nothing more than the sum total of genetic difference from some ancestor. When you reproduce asexually, that's pretty much all you have to go on. We've sat and watched bacteria evolve entirely new metabolic pathways. In real time. So many times that you can barely get an article about it published in a journal of evolution because it's so mundane a result. Any one of these results could easily get classed as a new species. We've gotten bacteria that's genetically quite different from where we began. That's all that's necessary in bacteria to show that it can speciate over time. There is usually no other criteria to go by!
Even Behe had to admit that even under his simulations, bacteria could evolve seemingly IC structures within not only a reasonable amount of time, but under unrealistically unfavorable conditions.
How about bdelloid rotifers. When we first encountered them, we described a number of species based on morphological differences. Then we noticed something bizarre: no males. No sex. Just lots of apparent virgin births. Suddenly, it became apparent that these rotifers had at some point traced back to a single ancestor who for some reason started popping out babies without any daddy. And genetic studies have shown this conclusion to be unmistakable: because the paired chromosomes never recombine, they, unlike most chromosomes, have steadily drifted apart from each other via random mutation in non-coding regions, allowing us to not only track back the apparent "species" but even date the divergences.
And that's just playing around in the asexual areas you started us off in.
"There are over a hundred species of bacteria which we have been studying bacteria for well over a hundred years."
The grammar here is hard to make out. But hopefuly you aren't saying that there are only 100 species of bacteria. Heck, there are more than 100 indentified species of Lactobacillus alone. I wonder where all these bacteria that all share so many basic morphological traits well within the rates of genetic mutation to explain could have come from?
Before ranting on about naturalistic justifications, hows about showing ANY exmaple of what you mean by a justification of these concepts... of ANY sort. In my experience, all such justifications have the same problems getting off the ground, whether they are natural or not. In fact, the supernatural justifications are generally even more ridiculous.
As a more observant poster has already noted, most people think that things like morals are accepted and recongized based on shared values rather than any sort of "objective" justification. It's not even clear that the concept of "justification" makes any sense to first principles of morality. Either you accept the premises or you don't. If they are determined by anything, then they aren't absolute and so are arbitrary.
Natural selection demonstrates quite well how information is added to DNA. Variation provides the noise. Selection provides the seive. The result is information about environmental conditions encoded into the remaining DNA. Of course, unlike in your argument, I'm defining information in a very specific way. In reality, defining information in biology is really pretty difficult, because so much of it is contextual and happenstance.
Can NS explain how all information in biological life came from? We don't know. But no one has yet put forward an alternative process with any evidence to speak for its operation or detectable character.
The origin of the system of DNA itself is not necessarily via NS, but is no less implausible in terms of chemistry and entropy. The question of how the most basic of information got to be cannot be answered by evolution itself, but it doesn't seem to be implausible via some as yet unknown particular chemical process that we've yet to pick out amongst the trillions and trillions possible all over the place.
So, by and large, I don't find your hinting at the mysterious special origin of information very convincing.
You are a theistic evolutionist, like prominent biologist and ID critic Kenneth Miller. I think you might like his book: "Finding Darwin's God" It's a great read that picks on both ID theorists for misusing science... and militant atheists for doing the same.
We should note that while dogs show a tremendous variation of traits, they can still interbreed in part because the concept of "purebreeds" have so often collapsed in practice. Just like purebred wizards, most purebred lines have very recent common ancestors with other dogs and even wolves. Sometimes this happened by accident, other times because breeders just didn't have any other option to hopefully preserve a particular trait.
You're right about the wild though. Dogs have evolved to suit life with humans, and various traits have evolved not because they serve any great survival purpose in red tooth and claw, but because they serve a survival purpose in appealing to human beings.
In that case, they'd likely be wrong. In evolution, descedants never leave the groupings of their parents, and they certainly don't do so to jump over into a completely different grouping way farther up the rung.
Human beings are still chordates. Still tetrapods. Still amniotes. Still mammals. Still primates. Still apes. There is no way to define any of those categories that does not include humans... or gibbons. And the same is true for all life (even when modern life seems to lack a particular trait, like legs on a dolphin or a shell in an octopus, the history is plain and the missing feature is often just supressed or reduced but still discernable as being part of the development). In that sense, despite being very powerful, evolution is actually very morphologically and trait conservative. We stick pretty close to what made our ancestors distinct from other life at the time without every going back and jumping into another higher taxon.
There is no agreement on species because there is no good way to define species that will not be inconsistent or incomplete in some way.
When species diverge, for instance, there is often a range of hybridism still possible between the two (from all offsping are viable and can reproduce, to only some can reproduce, to only some are viable, to all are sterile, to none are viable) rather than a distinct cutoff. Where do we draw the line when there is no line?
How do we determine species for asexual animals like bdelloid rotifers, where there IS no reproduction, just degrees of difference in the genes?
And worse, when two species diverge from one, what do we do with the species name? If breeds of dog one day become genetically incompatible, the species name familiaris will still be useful: it will still describe both species as in a distinct group from other Carnivores or even other Canis. Do we make familiaris a super-species group and rename the ? Do we create s grouping below "species" that means what "species" used to (i.e. reproductively isolated population) and change the definition of species?
As you can see, there are no really good answers. Trying to come up with a perfect definition of species is, if evolution is true, a fools' errand. At best, it's a simplification used for ease of refference.
One major problem is the popular understanding of species as being some sort of really, really important categorization that implies some deep discontinuity in nature. The problem is, species is largely a concept we use to simplify and classify stuff to make it easier to learn. But the reality is far more complex and fluid.
Not two days ago, I visited a wolphin at an aquarium: a hybrid between a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale that has an almost perfect mix of traits between two species. These are obviously distinct species (very different in size, different numbers of teeth, totally different head and face shape), and yet they could interbreed: and wolphins can even produce their own viable offspring!
If evolution is true, then hybrism must exist. And it does (it was one of Darwin's major points of proof). But like many other facts of the natural world, hybridism ultimately undermines the whole concept of reliably defining species as distinct categories, just as interacial couples and kids make a mockery of the idea of distinct races. In fact, evolution makes all rigid classification inherently problematic in any number of ways.
But simply, there can be no real evidential doubt of common descent at this point. It's just too well confirmed by too many indepedent lines of evidence that converge.
And if you concede that dog breeds can evolve from common ancestors, then you've pretty much given the whole game away. Dog breeds are very morphologically different from each other: the underlying genes are different, and ultimately those genes could only have come from the selection of mutation, because they were not present in the ancestral asiatic wolves from which all domestic dogs are descended. If you can concede that this process can evolve something as different as a Great Dane to a Pug, then you are conceeding that evolution can produce radically diverse forms of life over even short amounts of time.
Now, you might say: but dogs are still all one species. Sure, but in the end, that's immaterial. Species is generally defined as whether or not populations interbreed. But this trait is ultimately no different than the differences in genes that can produce long snouts vs. flattened faces: reproductive incompatibility is determined by changes in genes just like everything else. There is no mystery to this process. We've tracked now distinct species as they diverge from each other and become less and less genetically compatible until finally they cannot interbreed. We understand the genetic mechanisms for why this happens. So none of it is implausible or undocumented.
Put short, there just isn't any good reason to think that evolution as we know it cannot create species and diversity in life. Even Behe, the leading ID theorist, thinks we evolved from a common ancestor with other apes.
Just so you know, there are plenty of examples of chromosome duplications in even just human beings where the carriers are able to reproduce. Downs syndrome is one example: women carriers can reproduce and pass on the disorder 50% of the time. There are rarer examples where the syndrome does not have the same mental and health effects.
You have to know a lot about genetics to understand the really complex ways that chromosomes pair and get read and how they then get split up for reproduction even when they are abnormal, but the reality is that even losing or gaining whole chromosomes does not necessarily equal sterility. Mice seem to constantly be adding or losing or fusing chromosomes in their evolution, for instance. Plants are even more flexible (heck, some plants are heptadiploid: six copies of every chromosome! You KNOW they're weirdos!)
"ID supporters don't disagree that evolution occurs on a small scale."
That's not entirely true.
"They only disagree with evolution on a large scale, meaning they don't think evolution explains the creation of life."
That's not true at all. ID supporters are in general critically of the ability of any natural system to increase what they call complexity, which seems to variously include SOME complex systems, but not others. That's attacking a lot more than the plausibility of abiogenesis (i.e., the creation of life)
"This theory states that a certain 'perfect' set of species were created, and all currently existing species as decendents of these orginals, but they have diversified over the eons making them less perfect but very different."
Ah yes! One of the few examples in which ID proponents have offered a testible claim or theory. And it is wildly, insanely in contradiction with all evidence of how evolutionary history has proceeded, how genetics works, and so on.
While I agree that ID is not necessarily creationist, it's pretty hard to deny that quite a lot of the people and arguments being advanced under the rubric of intelligent design are just retreads of creationist arguments with the word "God" stripped out. ID theorists who don't share these views have ever opportunity to condemn those who do this, but instead people like Dembski end up playing coy about it. It's hard to feel too sorry for them when they get accused of being creationists, especially when they reveal their own religious agendas to certain audiences but not others.
"You are obfuscating the arguments of ID because it is much easier to simply equate them with Creationism (especially young-Earth creationism) than to come up with fossil evidence or genetic proof of the evolution of the flagella; or the eye; or any of the other examples that ID purports to show design."
To turn this around: it's pretty calculating that ID proponents would go to the public with only those examples for which there is not, and there is likely to never be, solid historical evidence that allows us to track particular pathways. This certainly gives the layperson lots of room to infer things like "natural selection can never produce new information or species or build any sort of structure." This allows ID proponents to mostly accomodate any sort of creationism one wants to believe and avoid proposing any sort of testible conclusions to boot (which was always the downfall of YEC: it advanced testible conclusions that could easily be shown to be false)
"This page [cockeyed.com] is obviously out of date (although the girl is still cute!),"
She is soooo into you. In your MIND!!!
Our color vision is hardly the best in the animal kingdom. Like all mammals (who spent most of their formative years in nocturnal lifestyles in which color vision was next to useless), our color vision is quite limited. We certainly are far better than most mammals, but that's still not saying much. Birds in particular are far better. Not only do they have far higher acuity (they can make out things at much greater distances, but they also have much denser concentrations of color receptors, as well as more TYPES of color receptors (some have up to five types of cones, making them the only pentachromats in the animal kingdom, and most have two distinct classes of cones (regular and double) that operate differently at different brightnesses), allowing them to pick out far more shades than we can AND see more clearly AND deal more efficiently with light conditions. Their retinas, unlike ours, do not contain blood vessels, which scatter light and shadow certain angles. So much for that theory of needing blood vessels for acuity/color vision balance! Oh, and let's not forget light sensitivity. While humans can pick out maybe 6000 stars in the night sky, most owls can make out millions: a much grander view of the heavens!
Birds, the only living relatives of the dinosaurs: best frickin vision. Sorry, humans.
That's not what they said: they said form the start that product activation required creating a steam account, which obviously means going online at lesat just once. In fact, the only thing they CHANGED is when they annoucned that you would only need to do this once. Previously, they had implied that you would need to check in every single time you played the game (the reason being that I think their next step s to blend traditional SP gaming with a MP-type experience).
Given that many online only games are even MORE stringent about phoning home, in addition to costing more, I just can't see the big deal here. Their way has a lot of advantages, not least of which is portability and security (i.e., no one can steal my CD key and play my games and block or ban me out of the system)
I don't think so: the industry is not exactly a wheeling-eeling freemarket: it is instead dominated by big chains and brands that have an incentive to only deal properly with other big companies and publishers or else face the wrath. Add that to the fact that Valve has no way to create, box, ship, and promote the game, and they pretty much had to rely on somebody through the standard venue/contract system.
Sorry, but CS:S and DOD:S are (will be) way more fun than HL1:DM ever was or could be. Granted, a HL2DM could be cool also, and it's not shipping with the game. Too bad. But it's also inevitable, and we're already getting hints that Valve might be releasing a teaser of it soon. And to be fair, the SP is being called one of the best PC FPS games yet concieved.